231–240 of 251 posts
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Depends who you want to work with. 37signals keeps on emphasizing that they'll look up possible new hires. Having a repo on Github is all positive.
I've just heard about 37 signals this past month or two and am thinking about putting out a portfolio for them. Would they actually care about OS projects as a designer?
If an OS project assigned a Creative Director, that may help lead the way for other designer to join a project.
Also, Source Forge and GutHub and the like aren't going to cut the mustard for Designers. There needs to be somewhere like them, but tailored for design.
This means that, ideally, the design process comes before the coding process.
It can be very dispiriting for a designer to come into a project somewhere in the middle to find that major design decisions have been made and cannot be overturned. It is common, for instance, to find open-source UI that mimics the data structures of the code rather than the foibles of a human brain.
If a designer were to join an open source project they would be seen as "trying to change everything", "dumbing down" and "trying to take over". Which would, in a way, be true - and probably exactly what was needed.
I've often wondered if we designers could start open-source projects: start designing, publish & document our designs, release our work to the open-source community and wait to see if anyone bites.
I have seen this happen before and it was amazingly successful: Coverflow. Andrew Coulter Enright, a designer and artist, published a design for "how iTunes should work" on his website. Jonathan del Strother, a Mac developer, bit and published an implementation. Cover Flow was purchased by Apple Inc. in 2006.
I'd love to see something similar happen with a larger open-source app. Any designers out there want to join me in starting a site for exactly this kind of workflow?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Coulter_Enright http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Flow
During my day job I play the lone designer in an organization built from day one with only software engineers. I suspect the problems that I face there are similar to the problems faced by designers in OSS. 1. Communication. Developers use a completely different language than designers. If I come in talking about alignment, developers are thinking 'right left or center justified?' When developers start talking about…
Design IS optional and isn't as is important as you make it sound. Look at craigslist, hacker news, reddit.
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That's a very powerful example. The Expression Blend interface (though it's showing a completely different function) feels very uncomfortable, while the Lightroom interface feels natural inviting. I'm glad to have learned that alignment lines make up a big part of that difference (I also prefer the Lightroom typography).
I am working on a small book about design for developers. Alignment is one of those things that people often don't really understand (besides left, center and right). Perhaps I should make that section a little bigger.
P.S. "natural inviting" in my original post should be "natural and inviting".
I believe it's because open source projects are designed to be modular. Design on the other hand is holistic. So it's hard to integrate design into an existing project unless it's an open source project such as a CRM where basically designers can make nice skins of the entire project.
Fuck that. Good design IS modular design. If your designer isn't following best practices like modular design then they are NOT good designers. Learning to work in non-destructive modular ways was one of the most important lessons for me when I transitioned from art to design.
I agree with what you are saying, I don't think it contradicts what I intended to articulate. I was trying to get across that dropping a modular piece of code such as say a Database system(Like MySQL) into a project gives you a huge chunk of functionality which you can then build on top of. I can't think of the equivalent for Art, except for widget sets or something along those lines. Or a grid/layout template that doesn't require you to then go and have to update any existing art to mesh well with the new art.
Now to be fair: you can come up with the equivalent of the MySQL situation where say you start the project with say a widget set and just match it's style moving forward.
I could probably match all my concrete coding examples with a modular art project but I think there are two issues that in general going to come up:
1) A lot Graphic Designers are not to strong at building modular art as it requires a more rigid process. There are exceptions of course, but we are talking about in general why there aren't as many Graphic Designers contributing to Open Source projects. (Wordpress though is a good example of where there are tonnes of Themes provided by Designers).
2) Reusing a popular Design can make your project look more derivate than unique. Where as with code this is less the case. Though with popular Widget sets such as the design by Sofa for Cappuccino (http://ajaxian.com/archives/cappuccino-07-aristo-ui-theme-en...) is a good example of Great design that maybe benefits from this familiarity as it's easier to grasp what widgets do when you've used other Apps using them.
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Also, many (not all of them) designers don't understand the difficulties of usability, and sometimes mistakes it with "shiny". Usability of a desktop application is way more complex than a website[...] I think usability is a blend of user experience, usefulness and intuitiveness. I have a hard time associating the latter with either the programmer or the designer. My experience, as a programmer working often with des…
|Most times, when I team up with some designer they'd want to make pretty icons... The designer should know enough to you visual symbols that have real-world equivalents to convey the meaning of the button visually. Envelopes for mail. phones for contact button. Thumbs up to like, thumbs down to dislike. This is my first time learning about the open source project (never been on hacker news before). Can anyone provid…
VideoLAN makes VLC. VLC is one of the best video players in existence, it's also fairly ugly.
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That's a very powerful example. The Expression Blend interface (though it's showing a completely different function) feels very uncomfortable, while the Lightroom interface feels natural inviting. I'm glad to have learned that alignment lines make up a big part of that difference (I also prefer the Lightroom typography).
I am working on a small book about design for developers. Alignment is one of those things that people often don't really understand (besides left, center and right). Perhaps I should make that section a little bigger.
And yes, alignment is a big deal, especially in any kind of information design. Look at magazines, newspapers, good newsletters, business cards, etc. Alignment is all over the place, and most are designed on a fairly strict grid, i.e. many newspapers use a 6 or 12 column grid.
The big concepts I want developers understand are: Alignment, repetition, contrast and proximity. If you understand those, you will be a better visual designer.
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Funny you mention GIMP, that's one OSS program that needs a UI refresh badly.
I have not really seen any evidence of GIMP being that poor of a UI. The biggest complaint is the multi-window interface for which single-window mode is currently in alpha and should be out in a few months or so.
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I think some of the contention comes in the statement "first make it work, then make it work well and then make it pretty or fast (depending on what the project is)" and the belief that without good design in the first place it doesn't really work. Leaving design till the end means it won't really have a positive impact on the use of the software.
While my statement probably doesn't covey this very well, I certainly am not an advocate of amalgamating dirty hacks or throwing any thoughts about good design out the window in the name of speed. You are quite right that leaving design until the very end isn't incredibly efficient or effective. I'm also not a big believer in the "big design effort up front" methodologies. I tend to think of design (of code, at least…